https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xRjPy8c44vI
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. So last time we were taking a look at the perennial problems that are endemic to us precisely because of the functioning and structuring and development of our adaptive religio, the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive also make us vulnerable to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. And I propose to you that we can address parasitic processing with a counteractive dynamical system. We can address modal confusion by the cultivation of sati. We can address the reflectiveness gap by the cultivation of flow. We can address absurdity by cultivating prajna. We can address anxiety by cultivating inner dialogue by internalizing the sage through a process of internalization and dwelling that allows us to identify with the sage. We can address the process of alienation through the cultivation of communitas and I mentioned to you some new sets of communal psychotechnologies that are emerging and people who are trying to develop thinking about how to make use of authentic relating, circling, trying to break through our current cultural grammar to a form of authentic discourse and relating. So that’s on offer and that we can respond to existential entrapment by the cultivation of gnosis which can be empowered by a core capacity for realizing higher states of consciousness. So what you have is basically a higher state of consciousness that is empowering gnosis. And that is of course set within, part of gnosis as you remember I argued, it has to be set within a proper ritual context etc. I remind you all of that. And that this is being used to cultivate and of course is being reflectively transformed by a counteractive dynamical system that is going to of course get you sets of practices for cultivating sati, cultivating flow, cultivating prajna, cultivating communitas, cultivating inner dialogue etc. When this is set within a wisdom framing which, so that comprehensively the person is developing interlocking sets of virtues for addressing self-deception and for affording self-optimization. And this results in a reliable response of amelioration and alleviation of the perennial problems. I would say that’s enlightenment, at least the enlightenment that I’m trying to reverse engineer. The components can each ultimately be explained and understood by our best cognitive science, I believe. At least I’ve given you reasons that we can rationally hope that. What of course needs to be done is to still try and articulate wisdom from a scientific perspective and of course that is one of the most exciting things that’s happening right now. Something that I am privileged to participate in. All of the ongoing scientific work with the psychological, cognitive scientific, even neuroscientific work on what does wisdom mean and how can we cultivate it. And there’s just so many people and we’re going to talk about that at length. But we need to do something else because we need to talk about the way in which this whole project, as I said, can be delegitimized, undermined, and eroded if these whole sets of practices can’t be situated within an encompassing and welcoming worldview. So having an ecology of psycho-technologies for addressing the perennial problems is necessary but of course not sufficient for responding to the meeting crisis. I’ve been encouraged by meeting so many people that are trying to set up, trying to, I keep worrying, I want my language to be responsive to the creativity of these individuals who are trying to create these ecologies of psycho-technologies. I’ve talked to Rafe Kelly for example. He’s done some amazing work on trying to bring together aspects of parkour, the martial arts, people doing something like the circling practice, right? And again, create this ecology of practices. I’m talking to Michael Nathan and he’s trying to integrate ideas about the training and cultivation of wisdom into the training of martial arts in order again to try and realize an ecology of practices for responding to the meeting crisis. And so there’s many people out there already doing this. So I want to indicate that I’m pointing to something that people are already doing. I’m not trying to take credit for it but I’m hoping that and this, I’d be getting some supportive feedback, that the work I’m doing here with you of trying to articulate that can help facilitate these groups and help them coordinate and communicate and potentially commune with each other in a mutually beneficial fashion. So a couple more things. We need to go back to this. We need to talk about the integration with the historical forces because there’s a particular issue that comes to the the four. So this is the plan for going forward. Let’s talk about the interaction between the historical forces and the perennial problems. Let’s talk about more explicitly, can we respond to the loss of the three orders and the worldview misattunement? And then what that would look like and again I’m not proposing to found. I’m trying to just talk about what I see emerging and hopefully give some suggestive steps towards can we get that religion that’s not a religion and then put that into dialogue with other people who have engaged in similar project people like Tillich and Young and Corbin and Barfield and so that we’ve got at least I hope a very rich and dialogue with with a lot of momentum to it for trying to get to this religion that’s not a religion. Okay. So the historical forces, the loss of the three orders, let’s remember this and why it matters. So you’ve lost the three orders. We’ve lost the nomological and the nomological basically gives us this deep sense of coherence and connectedness right that is so central we know from our current work on meaning in life we lost the normative order right which gives us I would argue that sense of significance depth that we get right through self-transcendence and of course we’ve lost the narrative order which gives us a sense of purpose or direction and then as we’ve lost this right we have a worldview again in which we don’t belong and in which our projects don’t belong etc and of course that will interact with it it will exacerbate any attempts that individuals or groups have in addressing perennial problems and when you get that going that’s when the meaning crisis really bites you individually or right it really it gnaws at you as a person or as a community or as a group. Now I want to talk about first of all this interaction because it brings up a particular problem and here again I’m going to point to the seminal work of Wolf on her book on meaning in life at Wyatt matters. So I was interviewed by Leandro on a podcast manifested well-being and then he then later recently interviewed Wolf and her work on meaning in life so I recommend you going to that to take a look at her work also reading her book. If you remember she says that meaning in life is ultimately about a kind of deep connectedness that we want so we have all these metaphors we want to be we want to be connected to something larger than ourself bigger than ourself etc and that’s what makes our life meaningful and of course it’s this notion of connectedness but she says those are metaphors they’re what I would call their symbolic expressions of what what people are really saying is they want this she talks about it this way and think about how this just sings to everything we’ve been doing here we want subjective attraction to find salient right and to be drawn into we want subjective attraction to that meets to that connects with that conforms to objective attractiveness. So notice here you know notice here but of course the the the transjectivity here that it’s actually in here that the meaning is to be found and notice also the connectivity and how much this is you know the relevance realizing is the deep connected connection the deep caring the deep involvement the deep participation okay so that all lines up but then but then of course and here’s with this and this interact right what happens is she says ah because of this we know there’s no such thing as this we know there’s no such thing as this the scientific revolution and loss there’s nothing that is objectively attractive right this is a particular grammar right this is the grammar again that you know right you know there isn’t an in there there’s nothing there’s nothing there’s no meaning or relevance in this thing in itself this is ultimately a sort of a Kantian argument and we’ll sort of leaves it there she does allude to ways in which we can bullshit ourselves we can pretend we have objective attraction just by finding a group of people who agree to value the same things we do and that is a kind of bullshitting because the salience of the group is actually masking whether or not it’s given us what we’re looking for and she criticizes all of those attempts I think quite rightly and that’s where she sort of leaves it at least when I read the book I don’t know of more recent work she’s got an answer to it so work I’m doing with Thalia Brentedis, Jinsun Kim, Philip Rizovic we’re really trying to say is there a way of addressing this problem using the current cognitive science cognitive psychology neuroscience etc. I won’t keep saying everything that’s in cognitive science you know philosophy psychology neuroscience machine learning can we use all of that the best of that to address this issue see so notice that again this issue is an issue in which historical forces prevent sort of the fundamental legitimation of the whole project that we would try to use to address the perennial problems okay so what can we think about this well part of it is I think to ask if do we need things to be objectively valuable so what that means is that things would have a value independent about how I would value them or how you would value them and there is a particular move that you can make that doesn’t require that the thing has objective value right instead you could think about the set of characteristics that need to exist in order for meaning to be created at so what I’m trying to what I’m trying to point you towards and we have to go very delicately right I’m trying to point you towards that it’s actually the transjectivity of the relationship that we need and we don’t really need objective attractiveness that’s not quite right so let’s think about this relevance realization is inherently interested in itself because as I’ve argued that’s constitutive of it being a self organizing self correcting self optimizing self developing evolving process relevance realization is not something in me it’s not something in the world it’s in the it emerges in the affordances that are co-created by the world in myself it’s bi-directional in that fashion so what I need to be connected to I would argue is I need to be connected to finding the finding I need to be connected to those conditions that afford relevance realization itself those conditions that satisfy my inherent valuing of the relevance realization process it’s itself so so what does that mean what that means is I ultimately and want to care about the conditions that afford meaning making itself those conditions right are universal in a sense not in the sense that they are the same environmental conditions or the same psychological but the same set of conditions that make possible and afford meaning making itself and this sounds all very abstract and now I want to try and turn it around and this is something that I’m arguing for right that when we care won’t to to create the conditions of meaning making because we find them inherently valuing valuable because that is constitutive of our capacity to be agents and to value anything else when we’re doing that what we’re actually engaging in is a gap a a gap a is to love for its own sake the process of right the process of meaning making and the process of meaning making is the process of being a person ultimately this is a gap a and that’s why of course the things that contribute most significantly to meaning in life is our sense of being connected to other people agapically I’m what I’m saying to you is that there is a way of responding to this which is the cultivation the realization the appreciation of a gap a and you say but there’s no objective value to meaning making of course there isn’t but it’s not subjective or arbitrary it is transjective and it is in that sense transcendental in a Kantian sense it is that right what I’m involved with are the very conditions on the possibility of meaning making itself so to to agapically love people of course is not just to be directed at that body and mind it’s be to be directed at their conditions their community their environment their development their education that’s a gap a that exists independently of me of you of us of a group because a gap a proceeds permeates and follows us so part of what it means therefore and this and of course this is also part of the tradition but it becomes especially pertinent for us part of how enlightenment has to be for us is that whatever machinery we craft together for addressing the perennial problems has to be integrated grounded in an agapic way of being and then that of course makes sense to you think about being within the being mode having an either relationship etc we have to care about the conditions that make any caring possible so part of what we need to do right is to address this issue with a gap a the cultivation of a gap a I think we should ultimately see a gap a as our deepest appreciation for the caring that is intrinsic constitutive to the relevance realization that makes both the agent and the arena arena possible is that is that pointing to something that in the physics of reality no but it is pointing something is it therefore just pointing to something that’s romantically dwelling within my subjectivity subjectivity no it’s pointing to caring about something that is inherently transjective and has a value independent of my valuing of it because my valuing of it does not constitute it into existence I emerge from it and participate in it I am not the source or maker of it what about the historical factors the historical forces so we’ve lost the three orders we can I would argue we can make use of what’s happening in third generation cogs I for e cogs I in conjunction with the theoretical machinery even developing on the cognitive scientific side of things to address that the way I want to do this is I want to I want to make use of an article by francisco varela this is not me saying that I think that everything that Varela has to say all of his particular theories are right or something like that but Varela is one of the founding figures of third generation for e cognitive science of course that work was has been developed significantly since him and that’s why it’s important to only see him as a as a founding figure not as the final figure the seminal work of Evan Thompson if you want to see this these ideas taken into a depth get Evans book mind and life is just fantastic a book we talked about this the deep continuity hypothesis and how it re situates us right into an order because there’s a continuity between the principles of cognition and the principles of biology and then the principles of dynamical self-organizing physical system ok but I want to pick up on this because I want to pick up on something that he said because he writes this piece and it’s sort of autobiography simultaneously argumentative and autobiographical and he wrote it in 2000 the p it’s in a book called the psychology of awakening and he he talks about what he calls steps towards a science of interbeing unfolding the Dharma implicit in cognitive science so he relates the following thing he was trying to even asked to write an article about sort of and around 2000 is when third-generation cogs I was really starting to develop it and he was it was asked to write an article sort of what are the main insights or claims about this and I want to go through that and sort of unpack them a bit and then also unpack the elements so sort of what are the insights of third-generation cogs I and I have been trying to exemplify them for you I’ve been trying to exemplify them in all of the lectures throughout the whole of series but especially since episode 25 third-generation cogs I and unpack the four E’s I actually think there’s sort of five E’s but what’s also called five E cognitive science and how does it address these three or the three orders we says as he was doing this what had kept happening to him is he kept as he kept articulating to himself the insights that were central to cognitive science he found that he was constantly saying things that he found consonant with the Dharma the central teachings of Buddhism so he found this deep resonance between the science and a particular path about whereby individuals and communities actually cultivate meaning wisdom etc so he he lists the first one and this is one of the four E’s of cognitive science the issue of embodiment that were deeply embodied were deeply embodied so here’s a quote from that 2001 I’m sorry so that 2000 article mind is not program software or rule bound manipulation of symbols he means symbols in the mathematical sense not in the spiritual sense we’ve been developing here mind is not program software or rule bound manipulation of instead the mind right arises through immediate coping with the world okay so the idea here is right that we understand intelligence and this is something I’ve been trying to articulate right we understand intelligence as our coping with the world the way we are evolving the sensory motor loop right so that we deal with what right we deal with the problems at hand that directly afford our interaction with the world at large right so he uses the word coping because he’s trying to get us out of a fascination and a fixation with our capacity for theorizing not because he thinks that theorizing is wrong or that would because that would be a self-contradictory act he’s offering a theory but he’s trying to say that we have to he’s trying to get us to remember the other kinds of knowing and the way in which ultimately to be a general problem solver to be an intelligent cognitive agent is to have this right ongoing evolving fittedness the coping with my immediate interaction with the world and that this is the defining features he would argue and I would agree with being a cognitive agent and he calls that embodiment many people might see that Evan Thompson as enactment right so there’s a bunch of these ease here there’s embodiment other people might say what Varela is talking about there is embeddedness the way we are embedded inactive this is Evan Thompson’s idea that cognition is an inherently something we enact right right extended that our cognition is not in our head but it’s extended through our interactions with the world through our psycho technologies through distributed cognition because those are the four years whether or not we should pin this specifically to this or maybe it overlaps with some of these other ones that’s fine we’re going to see more of this with Varela anyways but notice what this is about the embodiment is about the idea that right there is a deep continuity between your most abstract cognitive abilities and your most well embodied sensory motor action I’ve tried to argue that you can see this in the following way that your cognitive your cognition is ultimately depended on grounded in the relevance realization and the relevance realization is ultimately grounded in your bio economy your body is not some clay that you drag around in our Cartesian fashion your body is a bio economy that enacts logistical norms of efficiency and resiliency that constrain your cognition so that it continually evolves its fittedness to the world there’s a deep continuity between cognition and biology and of course the biology is is deeply embedded you are engaging in what biologists talk about as continual niche construction so the new biology that’s emerging I’m privileged to know and I get to interact with Dennis Walsh here at the University of Toronto if you want to see some people are doing the cutting-edge work on the philosophy of biology take a look at Dennis’s work and the work of other people there’s an anthology I think what I’m trying to remember what it’s called I think it’s criticizing or reflecting on the the grand synthesis the synthesis between Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics I’ll get the right book panel to come up but but there is this idea about the importance of processes like niche construction for understanding evolution and the idea here is right and you see how I’ve been making use of this there’s the organism in the environment right and the idea is the organism is shaping the environment shaping and selecting the environment and the environment is shaping and selecting the organism and so you the organisms get involved with affecting the environments so that it is conducive to their way of being but they also evolve both biologically and behaviorally right to exploit and make good use of that changed environment and you’ve got this transjective evolving loop going on niche construction we do this of course on a broad scale through because what culture is is right we do this thing where we massively shape the environment and then massively shape ourselves to fit that environment right so culture is about both fitting people to an environment and fitting the environment to the people in this ongoing fashion and so that takes us right into this notion of course that we are deeply embedded we’re deeply embedded so embodiment leads to and there’s some people that argue that embeddedness sort of reduces to embodiment Roland seems to be arguing that in one of his books on the new science of the mind but anyways the idea here is the deep continuity we are deeply embodied we are deeply embedded now notice how that is going right it’s undermining the way in which Descartes severed everything right and if right so this is obviously a species of niche construction a comprehensive one right and if this as I’ve tried to argued can even tell us something important about consciousness both its function and its phenomenology then we can seriously respond to Descartes and say no no the mind and body are not disconnected they are in a deep continuity and the mind in the world are not disconnected they are in a deep continuity of embeddedness and inactive processing so what’s the second insight that Varela brings up emergence which is like it’s a major term now and this is something that has been invoked throughout this series the idea that right a system as the system is especially the system is self-organizing it can produce properties right as a system that the component parts can’t possess and so the idea is them the mind in this sense it emerges out of the embodied embedded brain coupled to a living environment right I’ve tried to give you ways of understanding that that emergence and and how it is reflected in your spirituality by your capacity for self-transcendence and how that could be understood at least in part a significant part by the complexification that is inherent in your relevance realization machinery in your religio so what does this mean for us this means that we are starting to get something like a vertical vertical dimension back to our ontology not a two worlds vertical dimension but the idea of emergence through complexification of right things like biology so you’ve got self-organizing things and they already right so what processes like the process is combustion is self-organizing a tornado is self-organizing erosion is self-organizing evolution is self-organizing and the thing is particular kinds of self-organization like like evolution could produce things that are more than self-organizing there they are right there self-making this is Varela’s notion of an auto poetic system there’s lots of controversies around this right and and I don’t think it’s like I don’t think it solves everything that Varela thinks it solves but it is definitely the case that unlike a tornado I am a self-organizing thing that self-organizes such that I seek out those conditions that protect and promote my agency right and then of course the self-making things right they can become right more than just self-making things they can become self identifying things you can become a reflective right self-making thing you can become aware of come to some understanding and appreciation of your self-making of the way in which you are inherently developmental because that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about development the way in which you’re self-making and then you can interact with that in ways that I’ve tried to show you and so on and so forth okay and so self-transcendence and notice what’s happening here a normative order is being given a metaphysical backing now I want to come back later towards the end of the series and talk about this bottom-up emergence and do it does it need to be complemented by a metaphysical idea of a top-down emanation and what what what might that mean and and I’m going to be very tentative about that because this is something that is you know really trying to break free from some of the deepest grammar that we that has gotten us into the mean crisis but right now I’m going to continue with Varela okay so you’ve definitely got emergence what’s the third one right so there’s all these E’s so he’s got you know embodiment which is shared with 4e cognitive science and I think whatever you think about some of his claims about autopoiesis and others he helped to really bring this to the fore for current cognitive science and this is going in this is now informing experimental psychology we’re seeing how much your embodiment affects your cognition right and then he right he gave the next one was emergence right and then the third one is emotion this is really interesting because the deep divide right but between emotion and reason a divide that I think is enshrined ossified in our cognitive grammar right and cognitive cultural grammar in the ongoing battle between the empiricists and the romantics between John Locke and Rousseau is right is to is being addressed and we went back to this and right and so we can think of the work of de Mazio here and Descartes Arrow and we talked about this and now you see this right that de Mazio was basically showing that people without emotion even though all of the calculative machinery may be operating normally well means these people that member you remember in Descartes Arrow right that right all the although all the calculative machinery is operating well they’re disconnected from their emotions they are incapacitated as cognitive agents why because without emotion without the caring that is integral talk right to relevance realization remember what Reed said that we’re different from communities and computers that we have to care about emotion and why do we sort of we have to care about information why do we have to care about information because we ultimately have to take care of ourselves because of the kind of beings we are right when you don’t have that you face combinatorial explosion there’s a deep interconnection between being embodied being a relevance realizer and having emotions emotions are what is the way in which relevance realization is brought up into the level of your salience landscaping and what emotions do is they craft your they shape and sculpt the salience landscaping such that an agent arena relationship becomes obvious and apparent to you when you’re angry you assume a particular role you assign a bunch of identities and you it’s obvious to you what you should be doing I would make this prediction that as we move towards making and we’re going to come back to this issue about artificial general intelligence as we move towards making artificial general intelligence we more and more we’re already having to give these machines something deeply analogous to attention and we’re going to I would predict have to give them something analogous to emotion so I think it’s better to talk about this I would put the two together right that within religio you always have caring coping caring coping and that’s the core of your cognitive agency the emotion also carries up to the relationship and of course this goes back to agape that emotion is how we coordinate the attachment I don’t mean it in the Buddha sense I mean in the psychological sense the attachment relationships between individuals such that we create persons that we create persons who are capable of dwelling within and coordinating their efforts within distributed cognition we create persons within communities of persons that shape themselves their community and their world to fit together in an ongoing agent arena fashion the last it points to is kind of excellence this has to do with connections between third generation for e cognitive science dynamical systems self-optimization and an aspect of psychology that has become known as positive psychology positive psychology is a way of doing psychology that is complementary to our standard way our standard way of doing psychology is to see how things break down how they fall apart and there’s two and I’m not trying I am not I believe most people in positive psychology are also not trying to dismiss or debunk or any crazy thing like that sort of standard psychology but standards because standard psychology studies the mind by how it breaks down for two very good reasons one is by studying how it breaks down we can analyze it and we can thereby understand its parts and how they might be working together and also by understanding how the mind breaks down how the psyche breaks down we can potentially therapeutically and pedagogically intervene to fix it repair it right therapeutic intervention therapeutic and pedagogical intervention so that’s very noble and I’m not trying to I’m not trying to dis that in any way but what positive psychology says is you shouldn’t study the mind only in terms of how it breaks down you should also study the mind in terms of how it excels beyond the norm how do all the pieces fit together in a way your brain is a machine of machines that can make itself into a new kind of machine how can the brain put right how does the brain write the embodied right inactive right embedded brain body sensory motor loop mind right how how does it transcend itself how does it excel how do we should study individuals who have optimized their cognition better than the norm because here’s the idea very often you can only understand something deeply not only in terms of its parts and how it breaks down but you can only understand in terms of the whole and how it excels because that reveals properties and powers that you don’t see in the norm and so positive psychology studies things like happiness meaning in life importantly and this is where for e coxsai and positive psychology really come together right wisdom wisdom is the term we give for people who have or who are excellent in their cognitive capacities for coping and caring and for I would argue responding to issues of self deception helping people deal with the perennial problems of human existence and so this becomes a topic a topic to which we are going to shortly turn because as I argued in the end we need an account of wisdom both for cultivating the perennial problems and also for how to make the best use of this science it’s one thing to have the knowledge that’s coming from this science but we need the wisdom of how to use it best how to understand it and use it best the deep continuity and emergence and development they give us back a nomological order we see in how we belong and we see how our meaning-making belongs fits in we see a normative order we see what it is to self transcend we have to do more on this especially with the topic of wisdom but how it is we can cultivate enlightenment how it is we can respond to the perennial problems how it is that we can bring about the best internal optimization the best external reciprocal realization how we can afford it and a god game I think this brings with us when brings within an important point this is the work of good enough which is a perfect name and her work on the sacred depths of nature and she talks about how as a scientist and she’s trying to recover that sacred depths of nature sacredness awe and wonder in a way that helps her cultivate wisdom and of course transcendence is integral to this and she talks about that we and you can see what she’s trying to challenge the fundamental grammar that we’ve had inherited from the axillary she talks about a new sense of transcendence instead of transcendence above which of course invokes the two worlds mythology what she talks about is we need this new sense transcendence into transcendence into the depths of nature transcendence I would also argue and I don’t I don’t see her as opposed to this I see her actually enacting it transcendence into the depths of the psyche and the two deeply integrated and coordinated together in reciprocal realization remember the opposite of reciprocal narrowing the reciprocal opening up the mutual disclosing which is experienced as a kind of love transcendence into so the one that remains the order that remains and unconnected for us to this argument is the narrative order because the narrative order points us towards a tea loss a cosmic tea loss and evolution and relevance realization are non-teleological they’re open-ended so if we’re looking to find something that will bring back the narrative order in that sense I don’t think we can find it but perhaps we should think differently about the narrative order perhaps we should think of the narrative order now as more to do with Gnosis we should think of it as an open-ended optimization an open-ended optimization and that we may have indispensable need for symbols and stories to afford that but we do not need to think of those symbols and stories as existing independently in the structure of reality we certainly don’t want to get back to utopic visions or their antithesis their antithesis in nostalgic visions because both of those have been the source of a lot of suffering and distress is it possible because you see this in stoicism you see this in Buddhism you see this in Taoism is it possible to move to a post narrative way of being in which we are concerned not with our historical narrative our horizontal identity but we’re concerned with the depths to which we are capable of living that perhaps what we need is not a grand purpose a narrative of a grand purpose that is connected with the history of the cosmos perhaps instead we can move to getting beyond a narrative way of conforming to reality to a post narrative the kind of experience people have in higher states of consciousness where the narrative drops away and nevertheless they experience themselves as deeply connected deeply at one with themselves and with reality and that this seems to have given their life these moments a significance to it and again there’s no mystery to these higher states of consciousness because there’s right there is no theoretical mystery because there’s a cognitive continuum from fluency to insight we’re just exacting the machinery over and over again to flow to mystical experiences to mystical experiences that drive transformative development the higher states of consciousness we’ll take a look at this proposal drawing this all together coming back to the talking about the religion that is not a religion to setting up the discourse with people like Tillich and Barfield and Jung and Corbin and we also need to come back and take a look at the cognitive science of wisdom because all of this is being done within a wisdom framing the wisdom that captures the excellence which was the fourth insight of Varela thank you very much for your time and attention